10 The Nation. September 23, 2019LEFT: REUTERS / JOSHUA ROBERTS; TOP RIGHT: ANDY FRIEDMANHURRICANE SEASONA Hard
Rain
“M
an Suggests We
Stop Hurricanes
by Nuking Them”
sounds like a headline in a sa-
tirical college newspaper, but
the suggestion allegedly came
from the president of the United
States. Donald Trump reportedly
told Homeland Security and
other national security officials
multiple times that the US should
“disrupt” hurricanes by dropping
atomic bombs on them. But
Trump’s unusual idea for fighting
storms distracted from another,
even more shocking piece of
hurricane news: Homeland Secu-
rity announced in August that at
least $155 million of the Federal
Emergency Management Agen-
cy’s disaster relief fund would be
transferred to US Immigration
and Customs Enforcement to
pay for detention beds and other
costs associated with holding,
transporting, and deporting
undocumented immigrants. This,
apparently, is the Trump adminis-
tration’s answer to how it will pay
to detain migrant families indefi-
nitely: by making FEMA even less
equipped to deal with a violent
hurricane season.
The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration es-
timates that the 2019 season will
see two to four major hurricanes,
each of which could make a cat-
astrophic landfall. Appropriating
funds meant for disaster relief to
detain refugee families is morally
bankrupt, potentially deadly,
and perhaps something more: If
the administration paints gov-
ernment agencies like FEMA as
ineffectual by denying them the
funds they need to function, this
can be read as a move to discredit
government services in general.
—Alice Markham-CantorLikud’s Cheerleader in Chief
Trump’s comments on the “disloyalty” of Jews have a long, sordid history.
D
onald Trump’s presidency is often
portrayed as a break from or even
a repudiation of conservative Re-
publican dogma. But in most cases,
it is merely an extreme expression
of what was already there—albeit with an extra
helping of egomania and ignorance.
This is nowhere truer than on matters relating
to Jews and Israel. Trump has coddled Israel’s most
recidivist elements and asked for nothing in re-
turn. He has consistently allowed Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu to immiserate and humiliate
Palestinians and to erase any vestiges of the peace
process. In the past, some Republicans
at least pretended to care about peace
in the region. Today, not so much.
The ideological transformation of
the Republican Party into a Likud
cheerleading squad was the joint proj-
ect of neoconservative intellectuals
and evangelical Christians, with a few
right-wing pro-Israel donors happy to
foot the bill. The neocons pretended
to speak for American Jews but took
positions at odds with those actually held by most
American Jews. They found funders in Sheldon
Adelson, Rupert Murdoch, Paul Singer, and others,
and foot soldiers in the evangelical churches and
in groups like John Hagee’s Christians United for
Israel. Sure, the conservative Christian groups were
sometimes peopled with anti-Semites, whose geo-
political analysis tended to blame Jewish billionaire
cabals for all the world’s ills. And while not so
enthused about everyday Jews, many were willing
to set aside those concerns because of their admira-
tion for Israeli military might, racism toward Arabs,
and a widely held belief that God gave Israel to the
Jews as part of His plan for the end of days.
Ever since 1967, the writers and editors at
Commentary magazine, the Torah of neocon bel-
ligerence, have been trying to talk Jews out of
their liberalism. It began with an article by Milton
Himmelfarb, an American Jewish Committee re-
searcher, and the baton was soon picked up by his
brother-in-law, Irving Kristol. (Commentary has
always been a family-run business. Kristol and his
widow, Commentary contributor Gertrude Him-
melfarb, are the parents of right-wing operator
turned never-Trumper William Kristol. Former
editor Norman Podhoretz—who was invited to
write for the magazine in 1951, owing to a letter
he wrote calling Israeli Jews “unattractive,” “gra-tuitously surly and boorish,” “arrogant,” and
“anxious”—is the husband of Commentary writer
Midge Decter, the father of current editor John
Podhoretz, and the father-in-law of Commentary
contributor and Guatemala genocide enabler El-
liott Abrams.)
The neocons believed that a little bit of evangel-
ical anti-Semitism in exchange for bedrock support
for Israel was a bargain worth making, but America’s
Jews consistently replied, “Feh.” You can measure
their frustration by the progression of Irving Kris-
tol’s articles on the subject, beginning in 1984 with
“The Political Dilemma of American Jews” and
ending with “On the Political Stupid-
ity of the Jews” 15 years later. For the
past four decades, neocon pundits and
provocateurs based at Commentary, The
New Republic under Marty Peretz, and
the now-defunct Weekly Standard un-
der William Kristol have smeared lib-
eral Jewish writers as self-hating—and
therefore disloyal—merely for giving
voice to the views of mainstream Jews
regarding Israel and the Palestinians.
Irritated by American Jews’ stalwart commit-
ment to liberalism, Milton Himmelfarb is said to
have quipped in 1973 that Jews “earn like Episco-
palians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” But of course,
American Jews vote
like what they are—the
country’s best-educated
religious group, ac-
cording to Gallup—
and mostly live in
cities in the Northeast.
Jews are more than
twice as likely as oth-
er Americans to have
completed college,
and their postgradu-
ate education is off the
charts. Moreover, they
cluster in blue states,
where they are overrepresented in the population
and in terms of their extremely high voting rate.
Metropolitan-based Northeasterners remain a
bedrock of American liberalism just as rural, reli-
gious Southerners contribute to Trump’s base.
The question of Jewish loyalty to America and
to the other nation-states where the diaspora has
been prominent is another, much longer story.
For more than a century, the leaders of AmericanTrump has taken
this moment to
flip the script and
accuse Jews of
being insufficient-
ly loyal—not to
America but
to Israel.Eric Alterman